Journal Articles

Mind the Gap! The growing chasm between funding-driven agencies, and social and community knowledge and practice

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The field of human services is increasingly adopting narrow practice approaches, driven by contemporary funding priorities. Such approaches reflect a reductionist understanding of human need, and run contrary to the wisdom, accumulated knowledge, experience, evidence and ethics of social and community development work. Drawing from a small group of refugee women's accounts of everyday challenges as well as their efforts to develop personal agency in resettlement, this paper highlights the mismatch between the complexities that such women face in everyday settlement processes and the focus of services available to them. It argues for a more responsive person-in-environment focus that could enable and enhance women's own efforts and aspirations for themselves and their children. The current tendency towards case management and away from community development is contributing to what we call the diminishing architecture of community development, and therefore represents a shift that is difficult to reverse. Refugee settlement work requires developmental actions within the cultural group, between new arrivals and the host community, and between new arrivals and the host society's resources systems and structures. Concurrently, the field needs to reclaim a broader paradigm of human service practice allowing for joined up, locality-based, capacity building work that is responsive to people, contexts and specific issues emerging over time. A broader funding paradigm that values social and community knowledge and practice, locality work and enables on-going, incremental, proactive changes is also needed.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Community Development Journal

Call Number

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Publisher

Thousand Oaks : Sage Publications., 2015

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

0010-3802

Classification

NONE

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Volume 50, Number 1 January 2015, pages 88-103

Subject(s)

Community development
Accumulated knowledge
Experience, evidence
Community development work
Run contrary to the wisdom

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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